Listen Here (30 page)

from
Racism 101
(1994)

I must have heard my first stories in my mother's womb.

Mother loved a good story and my father told good jokes, but it was her father, Grandpapa, who told the heroic tales of long ago. Grandpapa was a Fisk University graduate (1905) who had majored in Latin. As he sometimes told the story, he had intended to be a diplomat until he met Grandmother, but that is probably another story altogether, he being Black and all in 1905 or thereabouts.

Grandpapa loved the stars. He knew the constellations and the gods who formed them, for whom they were named.

Grandpapa was twenty years the senior of Grandmother, so he was an old man when we were born. Grandmother's passion was flowers; his, constellations. One needn't have a great imagination to envision this courtship: the one with her feet firmly planted on earth, the other with his heart in the sky. It is only natural that I would love history and the gossip of which it is composed.

Fiction cannot take the place of stories. Aha, you caught me! Fiction is stories, you say. But no. Stories, at their best, pass along a history. It may be that there was no Ulysses with a faithful Penelope knitting and unraveling, but something representative of the people is conveyed. Something about courage, fortitude, loss, and recovery.

I, like most young ladies of color, used to get my hair done every Saturday. The beauty parlor is a marvelous thing. Every Saturday you got the saga of who was sleeping with whose husband; who was pregnant; who was abused by whose boyfriend or husband. Sometimes they would remember the children were there, but mostly the desire of the women to talk without the presence of the men overcame their desire to shield us from the real world.

My mother's family is from Albany, Georgia, but Grandmother and Grandpapa had moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. We four grandchildren spent our summers with Grandmother.

At night, when we were put to bed, my sister Gary and I would talk and sing and sometimes read under the covers using our Lone Ranger flashlight rings. Of course, we were caught. Grandmother would threaten us and take our rings. We would sneak out of our room, wiggling on our stomachs, to reach the window under which we sat and listened to Grandpapa and Grandmother talk.

Sitting under that window I learned that Eisenhower was not a good president; I learned that poll taxes are unfair. I heard Grandmother berate Grandpapa for voting Republican when “Lincoln didn't do all that much for colored people.” I heard assessments of Black and white people of Knoxville and the world. No one is enhanced by this. I'm not trying to pretend they were; there were no stories of “the African” in my family, although I am glad there were in Alex Haley's.

We were just ordinary people trying to make sense of our lives, and for that I thank my grandparents. I'm lucky that I had the sense to listen and the heart to care; I'm glad they talked into the night, sitting in the glider on the front porch, Grandmother munching on fried fish and Grandpapa eating something sweet. I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. There must always be griots…else how will we know who we are?

from
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni
(1996)

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice-cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep

from
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni
(1996)

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i'd be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she's natural
i would have a revolution

from
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni

how do poets write
so many poems
my poems get decimated
in the dishes the laundry
my sister is having another crisis
the bed has to be made
there is a blizzard on the way go to the grocery store
did you go to the cleaners
then a fuse blows
a fuse always has to blow
the women soon find themselves
talking either to babies or about them
no matter how careful we are
we end up giving tips
on the latest new improved cleaner
and the lotion that will take the smell away

if you write a political poem
you're anti-semitic
if you write a domestic poem
you're foolish
if you write a happy poem
you're unserious
if you write a love poem
you're maudlin
of course the only real poem
to write
is the go to hell writing establishment poem
but the readers never know who
you're talking about which brings us back
to point one

i feel i think sorry for the women
they have no place to go
it's the same old story blacks
hear all the time
if it's serious a white man
would do it
when it's serious
he will
everything from writing a poem
to sweeping the streets
to cooking the food
as long as his family doesn't eat it

it's a little off center
this life we're leading
maybe i shouldn't feel sorry
for myself
but the more i understand women
the more i do

(June 18, 1937–)

Gail Godwin grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, with her mother and her maternal grandmother. In her essay “On Becoming a Writer,” Godwin explains that her grandmother took care of their domestic life, while her mother, Kathleen Godwin, who had earned an M.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, divided her days between teaching English at a local college and working as a newspaper reporter with the
Asheville Citizen.
Godwin has strong memories of her mother typing her own stories on the weekends. By the time she was five, Godwin says, “I had allied myself with the typewriter rather than the stove.”

After attending Peace Junior College (1955–1957) and graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1959, Godwin worked as a journalist for two years at the
Miami Herald.
She married and divorced a
Herald
photographer.

From 1961 to 1965, she worked with the United States Travel Service in London, before beginning her master's degree at the University of Iowa. “London is where I really got my education,” she explains. “It was the perfect job for someone in her early twenties who wanted to write but needed money and experience.” While she lived abroad, she read novels and wrote her first novel. She also married again and, within a year, divorced a second time.

By 1971, she completed her Ph.D. in Iowa, where Kurt Vonnegut was one of her teachers, and John Irving and Jane Barnes were among her classmates.

A Mother and Two Daughters
, one of her most popular novels, was on the
New York Times
Best-Seller List for most of 1982. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Award for
A Southern Family
, and three of her novels (
The Odd Woman, Violet Clay
, and
A Mother and Two Daughters
) have been nominated for National Book Awards.

In this excerpt from
A Southern Family
, two childhood friends, Julia and Clare, a writer who has returned home for a visit, share a mountain hike during their annual reunion.

Novels:
Evenings at Five
(2003),
Evensong
(1999),
The Good Husband
(1994),
Father Melancholy's Daughter
(1991),
Remembering Felix
(1989),
A Southern Family
(1987),
The Finishing School
(1985),
Mr. Bedford and the Muses
(1983),
A Mother and Two Daughters
(1982),
Violet Clay
(1978),
Dream Children
(1976),
The Odd Woman
(1974),
Glass People
(1972),
The Perfectionists
(1970).
Nonfiction:
Heart
(2002).
Autobiographical essays:
“Becoming a Writer,”
The Writer on Her Work
(1980), ed. Janet Sternburg, 231–55. “A Novelist Breaches the Border to Nonfiction,”
New York Times
(15 Jan. 2001). “Uncle Orphy,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 141–45.

Joyce Dyer, review-essay on
A Southern Family, Appalachian Journal
15:4 (summer 1988), 382–86. Joyce Dyer, “Gail Godwin,” in
Bloodroot
, 140. Dannye Romine Powell, “Love and Order” [Interview with Gail Godwin],
Charlotte
[NC]
Observer
(16 October 1994), Fl, F5. Mary Ann Wimsatt, “Gail Godwin” in
Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook
(1993), 193–201. Mary Ann Wimsatt, “Gail Godwin's Evolving Heroine: The Search for Self,”
Mississippi Quarterly
42:4 (winter 1988–89), 27–45.

from Chapter II

“How did you ever find this place, Julia? A meadow on top of a mountain? The air up here is like champagne. Why didn't we know about this spot when we were growing up?”

“It's called Pinnacle Old Bald by the locals, but it still goes by its unpronounceable Indian name on the maps. So when people come asking for it, of course, the locals can't—or won't—tell them where it is. And you know as well as I do that there are a whole lot of things we didn't know about when we were growing up.”

“You said a mouthful there, honey.” Clare clapped her friend jovially on the arm as the two of them, Julia in front, hiked up a wide path in noon sunshine towards a dome-shaped golden meadow sticking right up into the blue sky. Clare was lighter of heart since Julia had driven her away from Quick's Hill this morning. The frown lines between her brows had disappeared and her shoulders had sprung back, as if released from an invisible load. She grew more confident and relaxed with every breath she took of the invigorating air.

“The spirits are pretty friendly up here,” Julia said, “if you come with the right attitude. It's supposed to have been an Indian burial ground once. A retired Navy officer owns it now. But he allows hikers and picnickers, as long as they clean up after themselves and don't bring guns. Anyway, he's not here very much. I think it's just an ‘investment' for him. That's a Christmas tree farm, all those little spruces in rows on that sunny slope. The caretaker was one of my students, that's how I know about it.”

“Well, I love it. There's something…sacred about it. I wouldn't mind being buried up here.”

“I think you'll enjoy it much more being alive, dear.” But Julia was pleased with Clare's enthusiasm. She liked to show her new places, places in these mountains they had never dreamed existed when they were growing up. It had become a self-imposed commission for Julia to be able to produce a different hiking and picnic spot every year when Clare visited. It was Julia's way of reminding her old friend that there were rewards for those who returned to live in the place where they were born. Perhaps it was also, Julia thought, a way of reassuring herself that the old and familiar harbored special revelations for those who hung around faithfully and stayed alert. “I was going to take you up to Mount Mitchell, but George and I drove up there in August for a hike, and when we got there and saw what had happened to it, we just turned the car around and went somewhere else.”

“God! Its terrible. I saw a picture of it; it made the front page of the
Times.
All those noble red spruce woods where we used to camp out as Girl Scouts look like some blasted peak in Hell. Acid rain. All the way from Ohio, the article said. From smokestacks of coal-burning furnaces. I got very depressed when I read it. One more old landmark gone. Just like the old St. Clothilde's getting torn down board by board when I was away in England. But Mount Mitchell, you would have thought, was inviolable. Do you remember that year, when we were camping out and everybody started blowing on the fire, only the air was so thin we couldn't get our breaths properly and Freddy Stratton just sank in a heap all of a sudden and that good-looking forest ranger had to pick her up in his arms and carry her to the station wagon so they could get her back down to the camp infirmary?”

Julia laughed. “I'll bet she wasn't so far gone that she couldn't enjoy it.”

“You know, I've about got up my courage to phone Freddy. I've been working up to it for years. I want to test whether I'm over that terrible sense of inferiority she could make me feel just by looking at me. It's been over twenty years since I last saw her.”

“I wish you
would
call her. It's time you realized she's not the archrival you always made her into. I saw her a couple of weeks ago, out at that new crafts center they've made out of the old railway depot. At first I didn't recognize her; I thought it was just one more tense society matron in her Talbots catalogue clothes. She nursed her mother at home through the last stages of lung cancer, you know. Yet, the whole time we talked, Freddy was chain-smoking.”

“What did you talk about?” Clare's voice, suddenly regressing to its anxious adolescent pitch, reminded Julia how jealous Clare had been of Freddy Stratton's sudden courting of Julia when they had reached the age when it was time to meet the right kind of boys and there was Julia's family conveniently living on the Belvedere School grounds.

“Well, her mother, of course. I said, ‘It must have been awful for you,' and she said, ‘No, I was really
glad
to be able to do it.' And she asked about you. I told her you'd be coming down to visit your family.”

“What did she say about me?”

“Well, she asked how I felt about your using my family in your novel.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that I had known you were doing it, that we had even corresponded about it, but that, really, it wasn't my family when you got through with us. I explained to her that was the way writers work. You made up your own Richardson family and called them the Taylors. You idealized us into a sort of generic genteel Southern family.”

“Oh, do you think so?” Clare sounded annoyed.

“More or less. But what does it matter? It's a fine book. And It's given my father's ego a boost. Not that my father's ego exactly
needs
a boost, but—”

“So how is George?” Clare changed the subject abruptly. “Is that still on, then?”

“I'm not sure ‘on' is the word for it—I mean, we were never on fire, or anything—but we're not altogether
off
, so I guess it'll do. We both like to walk, and eat good food, and complain about how they overwork us at North State. We make love once a week, on Friday nights, when I stay over at his house. He's very…punctilious. And on Saturday morning we have a big celebratory breakfast because we've acquitted ourselves like a normal couple, and then he starts looking wistfully towards his study—he's doing a book on medieval French monasteries—and I rinse the dishes and put them in his dishwasher and go home and do my own laundry. Actually we suit each other very well. He would have made a perfect Jesuit if God hadn't been so inconsiderate as to cause him to be born into a Protestant family, and I…well, I've had the feeling lately that I'm just marking time until I reach the age when I can dispense with the social necessity of having a boyfriend.”

“Julia, do you really feel that way?”

“I'm exaggerating a little, but I
can
imagine how it would be. It wouldn't be so different from our early adolescence, when we were just…ourselves. Before we got infected with the notion that we'd better go hide in our closets if we didn't have a man to go out with on Saturday night. You know, I counted it up the other night: it's been fifteen years since I was a married person, and I was married only four years. Even counting live-in lovers, by far the greatest portion of my adult life has been spent alone. It may well be that solitude is my most natural state.”

“I used to think that, before I met Felix. Now I don't know. I think my talent for living alone may have atrophied. Funny, isn't it, you're the one who's been married and you're talking like a spinster; whereas I'm the real spinster, I'll probably never marry, but I can't imagine life without Felix.”